MARC HYDEN: Losing its flawed chief isn’t enough to change Georgia GOP’s fortunes

The Georgia Republican Party is getting a makeover. Its troubled chief — David Shafer — announced that he will not run for re-election, which can only be considered a benefit to the GOP. After all, his tenure has been disastrous.

“He was a key promoter of Trump’s election fraud lies,” wrote the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “and his role as a ‘fake’ elector has potentially put him in the crosshairs of state and federal investigators weighing whether to file criminal charges against the former president and his allies on allegations they tried to illegally overturn the election.”

If this weren’t enough, Shafer also presided over some of the Georgia Republican Party’s most embarrassing and high-profile defeats in recent history. Not one, not two, but three U.S. Senate races went in favor of the Democrats on his watch, and Georgia flipped blue in the presidential election for the first time since 1992.

Georgia Republicans should be thrilled to get a different GOP chair without this baggage, but they shouldn’t expect this alone to change their fortunes. The cause of their electoral defeats runs far deeper, and it will take a concerted effort for Republicans to right the ship.

According to a grossly overused adage, “showing up is half the battle,” and Republican voters would be wise to take that seriously. Back in 2021, then-U.S. Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., was in a fight for his political life. He had won the plurality of the votes in November 2020, but he fell short of winning the majority, which triggered a runoff.

Despite the importance of Perdue’s Senate seat, after President Trump lost, many Republicans shrugged and avoided voting. “Over 752,000 Georgia voters who cast ballots in the presidential election didn’t show up again for the runoffs just two months later,” the AJC found. The majority of these came from regions and demographics that leaned Republican. In short, Republicans stayed home, and Perdue lost.

Georgia Republicans seemingly were given a golden opportunity to recapture one of the Senate seats, but they chose a flawed candidate — former football star Herschel Walker. Before and during the primary election, his questionable history was well-known, but matters grew even more complicated during the general election.

One of his ex-girlfriends accused him of domestic violence. Researchers discovered that Walker has three other children, which he hadn’t previously acknowledged publicly. He seemed to avoid the media — at least media members who might ask tough questions. And one of my favorite head-scratching moments was when he told supporters at a rally, “I don’t want to be a vampire any more. I want to be a werewolf.” Whatever that means.

Republicans have taken their lumps in Georgia over the past two elections, and in any competition, there will be winners and losers. That’s just how it works, but whether we are talking about Trump’s defeat or others’, there’s been an element within the GOP that latches onto conspiracy theories to try to explain their electoral setbacks rather than taking responsibility and admitting defeat.

“After voters rejected Trump at the polls in 2020, he and his supporters blamed election fraud,” I wrote last year. “Some asserted that somehow Hugo Chavez — the dead Venezuelan former dictator — or his family undermined the election and that the Dominion voting machines switched people’s votes from Trump to Joe Biden. Still others said that operatives figured out a way to exploit the absentee voting system.”

To date, no election conspiracy theory attempting to explain Republican defeats in 2020 or 2022 has been proven to hold water. Nevertheless, they still persist, which represents a combination of sore-loser-ism and a lack of accountability from failed candidates. This likely discourages voter turnout — persuading people to think that voting in a “rigged” system is futile — and undermines our democratic forms. That is bad not only for Republicans, but for all Americans.

Time will tell how important replacing the Georgia GOP chair is to rebuilding the Republican Party. If the GOP wants to reign supreme in the Peach State, then they have their work cut out for them. They can start by showing up to vote and promoting more quality candidates, but they also must take responsibility for defeats, learn from them, and stop blaming election tampering where it doesn’t exist.